Snakes and Ladders

by Seanan McGuire

  Well, she wasn’t going to be afraid of any stupid ol’ snake god. No matter how much bigger it was than her, or how long its tail was, or how big its mouth was…

  The snake god seemed to come to a decision, because it leaned forward, reaching for her with scaly, heavily-muscled arms.

  Alice screamed again, and the snake god clapped its hands over the spaces where its ears should have been, hissing furiously. Still screaming, Alice started to scramble away, pedaling backward as fast as she could. Her galoshes couldn’t find much traction on the snake god’s scales, and it took several wasted, ineffectual kicks before she slid into an untidy somersault, tumbling into the rotten straw piled on the hard-packed earth of the basement floor. Her ankles were still pressed against the tail of the snake god, and so she rolled to her hands and knees, crawling toward the wall. She wasn’t clear on where she was going to go, but she was planning for “as far away from the giant snake that maybe eats little girls” as possible.

  She had almost made it to the wall when an arm wrapped around her waist and a strong, scaly hand clamped itself over her mouth, cutting off her screaming on one final, drawn-out shriek. Kicking futilely, she was lifted into the air and turned around to face the snake god.

  His eyes were yellow, with thin black slits for pupils, and he had no ears, but other than that, his features were almost human. The scales got smaller as they reached his chest, and by the time they got to his face, they were so fine and small that they looked like very shiny skin.

  His tongue flicked out, like a snake’s does when it’s tasting prey.

  Alice Healy was, in some ways, a remarkable little girl, especially considering that she was only six years old. She was clever, courageous, and possessed of a capacity for invention and self-preservation that many adults would have done well to emulate. She was, however, still only six years old, and since the beginning of the night, she had been kidnapped, blindfolded, hit repeatedly, threatened, and now thrown into a cage with a giant snake-man who was, presumably, intending to eat her. Even remarkable little girls have limits, and it was something of a relief when Alice’s resolve, tested beyond all reasonable bounds, finally gave out, and she tumbled mercifully into unconsciousness.

  *

  Mary hurried to catch up with Fran as she stalked down Old Orchard Road, heading for the turnoff to the rural post route that wound away from town, deeper into the circling woods. “Are you sure we shouldn’t be going for, I don’t know, the police? Or at least one of those big angry mobs with torches?”

  “Angry mobs are for vampires and mad scientists bent on breaking the laws of God and man, and the police ’round here aren’t good for much of anything ’cept justifying whatever just ate those campers as an angry bear with rabies,” Fran said grimly. She had put the shotgun away, which didn’t reassure Mary as much as she’d expected it to; Fran was walking with her hands just above the pistols that dangled from her belt, and something about that stance made her look even more likely to shoot something at any moment than she had before.

  “What about calling home? The rest of the family?”

  “No time,” Fran snapped.

  The directions they’d received from Carl the Sasquatch were sketchy at best; he said the newly-founded snake cult was keeping their god in one of the abandoned old buildings on the rural route off Old Orchard. Even the desperate and the destitute of Old Orchard weren’t willing to move onto the rural route, where the darkness that crept out of the woods had actually finished the long, slow process of reclaiming the town that man had made. There had been too many unexplained deaths there, too many disappearances for even the blunted sensibilities of Buckley to tolerate; no one had lived out there for almost twenty years, and the few remaining structures were collapsing slowly inward, done in by neglect and decay. It was the perfect place to hide an underpowered god, as long as you weren’t particularly concerned about tetanus.

  They’d walked almost the full length of the road when Fran stopped, expression going blank, and bent to pick something up, holding it at chest-level so that Mary could have a proper look. Alice’s hat.

  “Come on.” Fran turned toward the nearest building, a crumbling old barn whose closed doors were surprisingly intact. “I think we’re almost there.”

  *

  “Priestess?” The voice was small, worried, and about an inch from Alice’s ear. “Priestess, please bestir yourself, and rise. We grow concerned, for did not the Patient Priestess say, lo, That Child Would Not Nap If the Devil Himself Commanded It?”

  Alice kept her eyes screwed shut. She didn’t like worrying the mice—the mice had a way of worrying you right back when you upset them, and while she might be bigger, they outnumbered her—but when faced with a choice between worrying the mice and acknowledging the existence of a giant snake-man who probably wanted to have a little girl in his trick-or-treat bag, she’d take worrying the mice any day of the week. They could be mad at her later.

  Dolefully, the mouse squeaked, “The Priestess does not wake. Woe!” Behind him, equally doleful, all the other stowaway mice intoned, “Woe.”

  “We could shake her by her feet,” said an unfamiliar, clinically interested voice. It was male, and there was a certain worrisome sibilance to its ‘s’s. Alice whimpered. “Or perhaps she’s faking. Do Priestesses fake unconsciousness, little mouse priest?”

  “No!” squeaked the mouse indignantly. “For is it not said That Girl Knows No Fear, and Dammit, Fran, She’s Going to Get Herself Et, and This Is From Your Side Of the Family, Jonathan, No One In My Family Has Ever Hugged A Basilisk Before?”

  “Perhaps your teachings are wrong, little mouse,” said the voice.

  That was the last straw. Alice could play dead if it meant not getting eaten, but she couldn’t do it if it meant listening to someone say nasty things about the mouse teachings. A whole lot of them were based on things she’d heard her parents and her grandparents actually say, and that made saying bad things about them the same as saying bad things about her family. Suddenly more annoyed than frightened, she opened her eyes, sat up, and turned toward the voice, putting her hands on her hips and saying, “Now you be nice.”

  The snake god blinked at her. “What?” he said, finally.

  Alice continued to glare. “You be nice,” she repeated. “You don’t need to go saying bad stuff about the teachings. The teachings are good.” She paused. “Except for the ones about making sure I stay in bed all night. Those ones are just silly.”

  “The Priestess wakes!” cheered the mice, a bit belatedly. “Hail the waking Priestess!”

  “I…don’t think anyone has ever ordered me to be nice before,” said the snake god.

  “Well, then, they were being silly,” Alice said, with a small, firm nod. “Everybody oughta be nice. Or else.”

  “Or else what?” asked the snake god, nonexistent eyebrows knitting together.

  “My mama shoots ‘em,” Alice said. Giving the snake god a speculative look, she asked, “Are you gonna eat me?”

  The snake god shuddered. “Not only do I have no interest in being shot by your ‘mama’ for a failure to be nice, I don’t eat little girls. I try not to eat anything that converses with me; it seems rude.”

  “Oh,” said Alice. She paused to consider this before nodding and offering her hand to the snake god. He eyed it like he expected it to bite. Alice frowned. “You’re supposed to shake it, dummy.”

  “Why?”

  “So we can make ’ductions.”

  “What is a ’duction’?” Now the snake god was frowning at her. “I’d rather not make something I’ve never heard of before, if it’s all the same to you, small priestess of overly religious mice.”

  “Hail Priestess!” shouted the mice, helpfully.

  Alice sighed, looking put-upon. “’Ductions are where we shake hands, and I say ‘hello, I’m Alice,’ and you say ‘hello, I’m some funny snake-man name,’ and then we’re friends.”

  “Do friends get shot by one a
nother’s ‘mamas’?” asked the snake god. Alice shook her head. “Very well, then.” He took her hand, and shook it carefully. “Hello. But I’m not some funny snake-man name, really; I’m Naga.”

  “Hello,” said Alice, “I’m Alice Healy. I’m not a snake-man at all. I’m a little girl. And these are the mice.”

  “Hail!”

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you,” she finished. After a pause, she added, “You can stop shaking now.”

  Naga did.

  Alice pulled her hand away, and looked around the small, dark room. “Now that we’re friends,” she said, “how do we get out of here?”

  *

  They knew they’d reached the right barn when they saw the two men standing sentry by the door, their rifles held at ready. Fran promptly ducked behind the nearest snarl of bushes, hauling Mary after her.

  “Now what do we do?” Mary whispered, eyes wide. “They didn’t say there’d be men with guns!”

  Fran gave her a weary look. “You’re a sweet girl, but there’s a few facts about the nature of your current condition that haven’t really sunk in yet, have they? You’re dead, Mary. Dead means a lot of things, and most of them are bad, but what it really means is that guns aren’t a problem anymore. Not unless they’re loaded with blessed silver ammo that used to be part of a sanctified cross. Or rock salt. But neither of them’s all that likely.”

  “…really?” said Mary, blinking.

  “Girl, have you not been paying attention to what ‘disembodied’ means? You can’t get hurt when you’re not forcing yourself solid, and even when you are, you can’t get hurt for long.” Fran shook her head. “My daughter may be dead, and here I am lecturing a ghost on what she can and can’t have done to her. God have mercy, sometimes I think I married into the wrong sort of crazy.”

  “But you’re not dead,” said Mary. “They can still shoot you.”

  Fran looked at her, and slowly smiled. “Mary-girl,” she said, “have you ever heard of a decoy?”

  *

  Despite having been dead for several years, and all Fran’s reassurances that dead girls were remarkably difficult to hurt, Mary couldn’t help feeling like she was doing something that wasn’t just stupid, but actually suicidal, as she walked up the last little stretch of driveway toward the two men standing sentry at the barn doors. She’d left her borrowed cloak behind the bushes with Fran, and the bitter winter cold that now attended almost every moment of her afterlife was creeping back into her bones, chilling her right through. Her feet made no sound as she walked through the fallen leaves that littered the ground; dead girls don’t leave footprints.

  One of the men caught sight of her when she was barely five feet away. He turned, cocking his shotgun with a sound that seemed almost as loud as the gunshot itself would have been. The barrel of the gun looked big enough to fit her fist through. His partner looked over at the sound of the gun cocking, and then he was swinging his gun around as well, both of them pointing directly at her.

  “You’re trespassing,” said the first man. “You ought to hustle right along, little girl.”

  “Uh…” said Mary. Her mind had gone blank in the face of the guns and their empty, passionless stare. She was cold, she was dead, and now men were pointing guns at her.

  But Fran had been kind, even though she was dead. And Fran needed her to do this.

  Mary jutted out her right hip and planted her hand against it in what she hoped would look like a saucy gesture. It was a saucy gesture when the cheerleaders did it, anyway. “Golly, mister,” she said. “I didn’t know this was private property. You fellas look real lonely out here. You guardin’ something? Can I see? I won’t touch. Not unless you ask me to.” She giggled, trying to conceal her anxiety. They weren’t going to buy it. They couldn’t possibly buy it. And somehow, even though she was dead, and miles away, to boot, her mother was going to hear what she’d just said, and come to slap that dirty mouth right off of her face.

  The barrel of the first shotgun lowered slightly as the man holding it straightened. Mary blinked, surprised. They were actually falling for it. “What’s your name, girl?” he asked. “You look familiar.”

  Of course she did. They always ran pictures in the paper when somebody died. The obituaries were practically a who’s-who in Buckley. Mary took another step forward, and smiled. “Mary,” she said.

  The second man’s eyes widened. “Mary Dunlavy?”

  “That’s right, baby.”

  “But you’re dead!” The guns were up again, the triggers more than half-cocked.

  Can’t be hurt, Mary reminded herself fiercely. Forcing herself to keep smiling, she said, “That doesn’t mean I don’t still need a date for homecoming.”

  The guns went off with a sound like thunder. Mary flinched, but the pain she’d half-expected didn’t come. Looking down at her undamaged body, she blinked. “Huh,” she said, over the sound of two smaller, more contained shots. “I guess I really am invulnerable.” She looked up to where the men were standing, wobbling on their feet as bloody flowers slowly blossomed on their shirt fronts. “Guess you aren’t, though. Sorry.”

  The men fell. Fran stepped to the front of the barn, holstering her guns at her hips. “Let’s go.”

  “Did you have to kill them?”

  “Did they have to snatch my daughter and try to sacrifice her to their snake-god?” Fran’s voice was flat, entirely empty of all sympathy. “They made their choice. Not everything that isn’t human is evil, Mary. But not everything human is good.” She jerked her chin toward the barn. “Go see if there’s anything else inside.”

  “But the door is…”

  “You’re a goddamn ghost! Do I need to get you an instruction book? Walk through the door!” Fran made an angry shooing gesture with her hands. “Just go!”

  Eyes wide and frightened, Mary dove through the wall.

  Fran waited until the ghost was through before kneeling and starting to go through the pockets of the fallen men. She recognized one of them—he worked at the chemist’s, and always tried to short-change her when she was in with Alice and he thought she’d be too distracted to notice—but the other was a stranger. All the better for her. She didn’t like killing people, but shooting to wound was a luxury that she’d never really been able to afford. You shot or you got shot. It was as simple as that.

  The keys to the barn door were in the stranger’s pockets. She pulled them loose and straightened, turning to face the barn, and wait.

  Alice had come along after she and Jonathan had given up on having any more children, but Fran had never had any regrets about that. There had never been anything to regret, because the reward for everything was Alice, her darling daughter, who showed the best of what was in both her parents, and only the very slightest traces of the worst. There had been other pregnancies before Alice, and there had been Daniel, her beloved baby boy…but none of them had lived. It was just Alice.

  Fran didn’t know what she’d do if that ghost-girl came out of the barn with phantom tears running down her cheeks, if Mary came through that wall and said they were already too late. It would be worse than a few dead cultists, she thought; much worse. Because there’d be no reason to stop shooting, if Alice was dead.

  She was still standing there, waiting, when Mary poked her head back through the wall, eyes wide and dry, and said, “I think you should come and see this. Did you find a key?” Wordlessly, Fran held it up. Mary pulled her head back through the wall, and Fran undid the lock, and followed her inside.

  *

  “Mama! Mama!” Alice waved so frantically that for a moment, it seemed like she was going to snap her arm clean off. “You came!”

  Fran’s first overwhelming rush of relief at the sound of her daughter’s voice—she was alive, Alice was really and truly alive—was wiped away a moment later as her eyes adjusted to the gloom, and she saw the tableau in front of her: Alice, wrists chafed and hair tangled, but otherwise not visibly the worse for wear, was inside an old
bear cage, sitting on the coils of a half-man, half-snake that was twenty feet long if it was an inch. It was naked, and hairless, and looking at her with a sort of wariness that smacked far too much of a predator afraid of being robbed of its prey.

  “Sweetheart, you just move away from the snake god now,” she said calmly, pulling the pistols out of her belt. “I wouldn’t want to get you all messied up by mistake.”

  “I believe there’s been a misunderstanding—” began the snake-man, raising his hands in a warding gesture.

  “Certainly has been,” Fran agreed, and cocked the hammers back.

  “Mama!” Alice folded her arms, looking indignant. “You can’t shoot Naga, he’s my friend, we made ’ductions and everything!”

  “I assure you, I have no intention of eating your daughter,” added the snake-man. “I have no intention of eating anyone’s daughter.”

  Fran frowned. “What are you playing at?”

  “Tea party, largely,” said Naga, with a resigned tone that Fran knew all too well. Jonathan used it, usually when Alice had managed to corner him into playing Rodeo with her for the better part of an afternoon. “I assume you must be the vaunted ‘mama’ of Miss Alice, here. A pleasure to meet you. Please don’t shoot me.”

  “Look what Naga can do!” crowed Alice. Digging in her denuded trick-or-treat bag, she produced a caramel apple, and handed it to Naga. With a long-suffering sigh, he opened his mouth wide, wider, and wider still, until finally he was able to stuff the entire apple inside. His throat bulged and distorted as he swallowed it. Alice crowed with delight.

  Mary, who had been standing by the wall, blinked. “That must be really useful at parties.”

  “You’d be surprised.” Naga leaned over, lifting Alice down from his coils, and slithered to the door. “Would you mind letting us out of here?”